What is Harm Reduction?
When you hear the words harm reduction, what is the first thing that comes to mind? Is it a syringe exchange? Availability of medication such as Naloxone? Wearing a helmet while riding a bike or wearing your seatbelt in vehicles? All these activities are examples of utilizing harm reduction strategies. Yet, none of them clearly answer the original question; what is Harm Reduction?
In its simplest, most inclusive form, harm reduction is taking steps to minimize risk associated with an activity. The legality or inherent risk associated with the activity is moot, if steps are taken to minimize risk, it is engaging in harm reduction. Learning how to swim, wearing a seatbelt, chewing nicotine gum instead of smoking, and washing your hands are all examples of harm reduction. Whether we recognize it or not, we are all engaged in this work.
The Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) has a more formal definition of Harm Reduction. Within the lens of drug use, Harm Reduction is an evidence-based approach critical to engaging with people who use drugs and equipping them with life-saving tools and information to create positive change and potentially save their lives. In addition to their definition, SAMHSA has identified the six pillars of Harm Reduction that all Harm Reduction initiatives, programs, or services should include in their practice.
6 pillars of Harm Reduction
1. Is led by people who use drugs (PWUD) and with lived experience of drug use
2. Embraces the inherent value of people
3. Commits to deep community engagement and community building
4. Promotes equity, rights, and reparative social justice
5. Offers accessible and noncoercive support
6. Focuses on any positive change, as defined by the person
8 foundational principles central to Harm Reduction
1. Accept, for better or worse, that licit and illicit drug use is a part of our world and choose to work to minimize its harmful effects rather than simply ignoring or condemning them.
2. Understand that drug use is a complex, multi-faceted phenomenon that encompasses a continuum of behaviors from severe use to total abstinence and acknowledges that some ways of using drugs are clearly safer than others.
3. Establishes quality of individual and community life and well-being—not necessarily cessation of all drug use—as the criteria for successful interventions and policies.
4. Calls for the non-judgmental, non-coercive provision of services and resources to people who use drugs and the communities in which they live to assist them in reducing attendant harm.
5. Ensures that people who use drugs and those with a history of drug use routinely have a real voice in the creation of programs and policies designed to serve them.
6. Affirms people who use drugs (PWUD) themselves as the primary agents of reducing the harms of their drug use and seeks to empower them to share information and support each other in strategies which meet their actual conditions of use.
7. Recognizes that the realities of social stressors: poverty, class, racism, social isolation, past trauma, sex-based discrimination, and other social inequalities affect both people’s vulnerability to and capacity for effectively dealing with drug-related harm.
8. Does not attempt to minimize or ignore the real and tragic harm and danger that can be associated with illicit drug use.
By combining SAMHSA’s definition and 6 pillars of Harm Reduction combined with The National Harm Reduction Coalition’s 8 principles of Harm Reduction a well-rounded definition of Harm Reduction emerges.
What's in the report?
Learn about the history of Harm Reduction in the U.S. beginning with the AIDS crisis, governmental harm reduction programs at the Federal, State and local level in Ohio, and how nonprofits fit into the solution.
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